Seasteading is a REVOLUTION, not a RACE. ….I really dont care about the tax examt status of were you live. I really dont care about your ‘pace’ of seasteading.Your boys are your problem, not mine. I really dont care if u are the first one on a seastead or if you feel that u are years ahead of everybody.You seem to be very arrogant about your shit dude. Get real man. Your are not talking to a bunch of kids here.

Ocean, I suggest you delete your latest post. Vice was in no way arrogant and there is nothing arrogant about what he’s said. The man is simply remarking at the slow pace of Seasteading in general. And I have to agree considering the progress we’ve made in Singapore after just “getting our feet wet”. From where I’m standing it looks like a misunderstanding on your part, tone doesn’t translate well in text.

I am glad that so many are now seeing this a a viable issue. But I must say that 100 feet long and 50 feet wide is not all that big, especially when we are talking about the oceans of the world or even small natural islands.

Been MIA on the boards recently, but wanted to wish you guys best of luck with the project. I’d be potentially interested in helping out in the future (if needed), or at least dropping by to check it out if I’m ever in the area, but for the next 6 months – 2 yrs I’ll be stuck in this shithole. In the meantime, good luck, and remember to post some pics for us when things get underway.

OSDI has suffered a setback this past week. Octavian (Oceanopolis on TSI) sent us a communication, on Thursday December 17, stating his belief that Calin (Calin on TSI) and I (jtg423 on TSI) were wasting his time and that he was ceasing communications with us and breaking his ties, involvement & partnership with OSDI. We received this information with surprise considering Calin and I were making plans to be in Florida in mid-January to finally have contracts signed and time-lines agreed on for the MMK(Man Made Key),which was to be OSDI`s 1st project .

Let us say that we still feel that OSDI will be in full swing during 2010 and beyond. We are still firmly behind the Seasteading concept and our vision. We would dearly love to continue working with any person or entity that wishes to push this movement. We will not be using the MMK idea as it was presented on TSI due to not want to get into any sort of conflict with Octavian,and we wish him best of luck in his private and professional life. We do still intend to target the hotel/hospitality industry as part of a broader range of marine related ventures,aimed at building up industries delivering all the necessary infrastructure for the creation ,maintenance and running of oceansteads :R&D in marine safety , production of food water & energy, suitable & comfortable acommodation,etc… .

We @ OCEANSTEAD DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL (OSDI) believe in PIONEERING FUTURE OCEAN HABITATS, and we invite you to join us on this journey, from simply swapping ideas and exchanging information, all the way to building businesses and signing mutually beneficial partnerships,done ethically and sustainably . On this note , we will consider Canary islands and the Mediterranean as possible alternative locations for a floating tourism resort, aquaculture farm or a cargoship container oceanstead .Our website http://www.osdi.info should be active towards end of january, and we will elaborate on the immediate steps we have in mind for OSDI .

> ….I really dont care about the tax examt status of were you live. I really dont care about your ‘pace’ of seasteading.Your boys are your problem, not mine.

Vince:

Just explaining why I am not in a big hurry to move now.

Oceanopolis:

I really dont care if u are the first one on a seastead or if you feel that u are years ahead of everybody.You seem to be very arrogant about your shit dude. Get real man. Your are not talking to a bunch of kids here.

Vince:

I don’t really care if I am the first either.

I think the only big problem with moving to international waters is how to design an affordable structure that is safe and comfortable in those waves (assuming you can telecommute). I think I can see how a single family seastead could be built so that it was safe, comfortable, and affordable. But I just don’t see anyone else working in a direction I think is reasonable. There is a chance Eelco might be, I have yet to see his talk or any drawings of any of his designs, so I don’t know. But connecting a few houseboats together does not help with waves at all. One houseboat on its own can not handle waves and connected together it would fail even sooner. So in my view it would not be helping with the real problem, even if it were built, which it now sounds like it will not be. This is the other thing that amazes me. There is all kinds of talk on these forums but not a lot of work really. The wiki pages are not getting much work. Nobody else has even spent an afternoon making a model, testing it in some waves, and posting the video.

The guys that made the first bicycles and first airplanes had to try all kinds of experiments to understand what works. I think seasteading needs the same kind of experimentation and it is not getting it. If the seasteaders had a culture of engineering and experimentation, then I think they would make progress. But I don’t see that in others. So I sort of feel like I don’t fit in with the seasteading group. I am a bit surprized and saddened by this really. I think engineering problems like seasteading are better advanced by contests and prizes, which TSI has only done for very constrained pictures, not engineering.

Probably many of the people reading this think the problem is not engineering. This kind of proves my point really. If this group was engineers and experimentalists nobody would say that.

Engineers have been trying to conquer the seas for millenia. It is not easy, else we would have colonized them by now. The main hurdles to overcome are all engineering in nature. If you build it, they will come. Such is usually the case, and definitely so with seasteading.

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There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Each to his fate.

Thor! I, we, agree with you Vince: the problem IS engineering. If seasteading were easy or even possible, nation-states would be doing it already. If not ‘poorer’ countries like the Maldives, Tonga or Bangladesh that are predicted to go under in a very few years then certainly a so-called ‘First World’ nation like Holland would be. Most of Holland would be underwater already! As for model building, I built and tested a several different ideas of the single spar design that was proposed on the original TSI book page and couldn’t get any of them to float ‘right’. If I were computer savvy I’d re-create them take pictures and put ‘em on here but suffice it to say they didn’t work, or at least I couldn’t get them to work to my satisfaction. I still like the ‘Ball-stead’ design of yours…

I would have to agree. I am not an engineer. But I do think that I can understand a lot of the engineering challenges, and the OSDI plan is to start “small” in coastal waters to start generating experience, contacts, and revenue needed to move onto larger projects. I do agree that this is not “real” seasteading (some have termed it boat steading) but just like with some large undertakings, starting small is sometimes the best idea. Your idea for focusing on single family seasteads, I think is in line with that. Same with Ellmer’s idea of the single family concrete steadings being built up until the communities are large enough to move into deeper waters. The same goes for xsndvd too with his 15 year plan. I look forward to any or all of us succeeding.

TSI has been instrumental in bringing these people together in a forum to discuss this movement and every aspect (even those ones that I personally might not see much real need for) most likely will be good in the long run.

I have a passion for the ocean. I have always been drawn to it. That is why I became a scuba diver. And that is one reason that I am drawn to this movement.

The technology is ready – no doubt – the general problem is most of all in the focus and inspiration, the ocean has been seen as a transport way (ships) as a hunting ground (fishing) – not as a living space.

Doing it in some way to change focus and create inspiration is key. Unfortunatly the only ones doing it now are millionairs on their floating luxury yachts – a example hard to follow. The other segments are individualists on floating bottle islands, houseboaters on limited spaces, oil and gas industry, – all this is great engineering – but not enough to get seasteading afloat.

We need to get it somehow “affordable and mainstream”. Technology only changes things if it gets mainstream (computer networks are around since the dawn of computers – it was “going mainstream” that created internet).

I would agree that the challange is engineering – but it is also kind of “going broad market” so kind of “strategic market development” at the same time. There is no need to fight about “first places” – the market is BIG – there is place for thousands of developers and businesses, ideas, solutions, niche markets – to join forces is the indicated strategy for getting it started.

This is the other thing that amazes me. There is all kinds of talk on these forums but not a lot of work really. The wiki pages are not getting much work. Nobody else has even spent an afternoon making a model, testing it in some waves, and posting the video.

The guys that made the first bicycles and first airplanes had to try all kinds of experiments to understand what works.

The big problem is that I don’t think seasteading lends itself to a “culture of engineering and experimentation”. The people who designed airplanes, bicycles, cars, etc started by tinkering around in their garage or shop, but that tinkering was low-scale and low-cost. You can’t compare designing a bicycle and designing a floating oil drilling platform. Anyone with some basic tools and the spirit of experimentation can work at night in their shop and play with bicycle designs. Building a floating structure that needs to safely and comfortably support several people takes hundreds of thousands of dollars before you even start putting concrete into molds or bending rebar.

I want to stress this first…I give you huge props for building stuff, testing designs, posting the results,etc. I just don’t see seasteading evolving from backyard builds with wood and PVC to multi-million dollar floating structures. You can build little models and float them in your pool or bathtub. You can even build bigger structures and test them in the sea. But none of that means anything when you are talking large scale or getting millions of dollars of funding from an investor.

Let’s say you had a new idea for an ultra-tall office building. You wouldn’t walk into the office of a potential investor with a scale model built out of legos or cardboard. Before investors would even meet you there would need to be detailed blueprints, AutoCAD designs, structural tests, and all kinds of studies and plans. And since most of that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars you don’t see too many hobbyists building ultra-tall office buildings.

So while I applaud your initiative and your efforts I don’t know how valid they are in designing seasteads. TSI has at least had an engineering firm with extensive off-shore and marine experience compile hydrodynamic, location, and structural analysis for their design. I’d take that over a model built with PVC and rope…or something done in Sketchup…any day of the week.

Did someone mention cheap and affordable? If you ask me, $20 per square foot fits both those criteria no? The only thing stopping us over here is that we just can’t anchor these things in anything deeper than 1.6km of water. In my experience with large seasteads, it’s not the platforms that are the issue. It’s the mooring systems. Our farm is perfectly capable of withstanding 3ft waves, but the deeper you anchor, the more expensive it gets.

Next of course is the money. Tourism is one possible angle, but the regulations were what kept us away from it. Instead we moved onto aquaculture. Far less regulation, recession resistant and it takes care of some food issues.

Finally, once the first 2 issues are out of the way, the last problem you’ll have to deal with is population. Few people would be crazy enough to get out of their comfort zones and move onto an island in the middle of nowhere. Which, I suppose, brings it back to ellmer’s point about making things mainstream. How do you make a frontier project for the masses?

The big problem is that I don’t think seasteading lends itself to a “culture of engineering and experimentation”. The people who designed airplanes, bicycles, cars, etc started by tinkering around in their garage or shop, but that tinkering was low-scale and low-cost. You can’t compare designing a bicycle and designing a floating oil drilling platform.

Seasteading is ideal for engineering and experimentation. Scale models in waves show you exactly what will happen to the large scale structure (just slow the video by the square root of the scaling factor). Engineering students would understand this and love this problem. I think my WaterWalker2 was far less ambitious than an airplane. Even the next size up, which I call “Floating Villa” is only on the order of a kit airplane in cost and time. Still far easier than figuring out the first airplane. I am looking at “Single Family Seasteads” not oil platforms. Oil platforms are almost always connected to the bottom so they don’t go up and down. Wrong model for us, not just because they cost too much.

This seasteading problem is perfect for modeling and experimentation. If seasteaders had a culture of engineering and experimentation they would be making far faster progress.

When Katie and I get there in May/June, we’ll have another interested person with us. Fellow full-time cruiser, told him the basics of the project and he’s onboard as well if you want him. So that’d be three people with two sailboats in total. All we’d need is a place to moor, electricity, food and water. Oh, and wireless. Lots and lots of high-speed wireless.